“Man is the measure of all things”: A critical analysis of the sophist’s conception of man

Abstract

With every passing year, our experiences of the human nature have continued to teach us more about the very nature of man. Consequently, there has been the need to unlearn much of what has turned out to be prejudices and errors in our conception of man. This notwithstanding, the question “What is Man?” still perplexes us, and the answers we provide to this question often show how distorted our vision of history and thought have become over the years. No doubt, there have been philosophers who have approached the problem in terms of already accepted views of the nature of man; and again there have been those, who holding a theory about reality, have tried to see man in terms of that theory. The point is that whichever is held to come first, God, Man, or the Universe, the others must fit into the scheme to make a coherent rational whole. As such, central to this article is a basic philosophical concept of the nature of man which exists amongst the protagorians of the sophist era, from the Ancient Greeks philosophers who postulate that "man is the measure of all things‟. The point at issue is that the brevity of the fragment and the absence of direct elaboration by Protagoras gave rise to endless controversy about the meaning of his proposition. This paper shall, via the reconstructive methods of philosophy, examine the Protogarian postulate of man against the Socratic philosophy of what the knowledge of man should really be. A critical and synthetic analysis of the major concepts in the sophist's position shall also be considered with a view to offering a justification or otherwise, debunk the sophist postulate that “Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not”.